Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3378 mails)

RE: [SLE] Polish That Disk

From:
"Greg Hicks" <ghicks@xxxxxxxxx>

Date:
Thu, 25 Apr 2002 11:01:54 -0700

Message-id:
<MHEHLEPPCIAFOLMHGDBFKEMOCDAA.ghicks@xxxxxxxxx>

NOW you are starting to make a little sense. The points you make in this
last email are in fact researchable and believable. the points made in your
previous posts basically insinuated that the hard drive manufacturers were
out to get us all unless we were diligent in our drive preparations. That is
what I got out of it anyway.
Greg Hicks

On Thursday, 25 April 2002 8:24, you wrote:
> > Many hard drives grow errors with use. The low-level format generally
> > finds these "bad spots" and adds them to the "so called" grown defect
> > list. This makes the space unseen by the higher-level reads/writes.
>
> Actually, to be strictly accurate, different disks do different things on
a
> low level format. Some do nothing more than wipe the partition table and
> other important areas of the surface. Many will do a write of zeros across
> all sectors, some will do a write-verify, and some will do a write-read.
> Some will build defect tables as you mention, some will actually do bad
> sector reassigns there and then. It depends on the disk.

Right. And many manufacturers give you a choice of whether to write the
whole disk or not. Just to be clear, yes you do want to write it all,
whether it's with zeros, or some kind of test pattern. Once this is done,
you have marked (reassigned) all physical defects and do not need the
reassign or block-test function; it WILL affect performance if you use it.
No worries though. Very, very few new errors will appear now, unless the
drive gets too hot.

I've managed to get my message to those who matter to me.

To the vomiting brawlers, sod off. I just made all this up, and it is
completely worthless information. Actually it is worse than that: it is
dangerous misinformation that you'd better do the opposite of.

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